All Future Versions of Windows Will Be Minor Revisions of Vista

In a Microsoft roundtable, Microsoft discloses that Windows 7, from a version standpoint, will be just another version of Vista. While this is something we've heard before in concept, this adds a technical layer to the discussion.

A good deal of the discussion has to do with efforts they took to ensure application compatibility, so that if something works on Vista it will work on Windows 7. One thing they did towards this end was to fudge the internal version number. The internal Windows version number (what applications get by calling the GetVersionEx API) for Vista is 6.0. Logically, for Windows 7, you'd think it would be 7.0, but instead they made it 6.1. This also happens to be the number for Windows Server 2008 R2. Click here for a complete list of current Windows versions and their internal version numbers.

Russinovich:

..., the version number change is actually one of the biggest impacts on application compatibility. When we moved to Windows Vista from XP going from a version number of 5.1 to 6, actually breaks [sic] lots of apps that check for the major version number. So a lot of people look at the version number and try to read something into it.

As Mark Minasi, also at the roundtable, noted: "So version 18 will be 6.1.1.1.1.1". If this works, Microsoft has a clear incentive not to change the major version again, unless it wants to break old apps, which it never wants to do.

Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever sincemuch to his own amazementhe graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.
He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10 years.
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